Trip home
Trip Start
Jan 24, 2005
1
24
33
Trip End
Apr 2007
Asuncion,
Paraguay
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
The plane ride home was an ordeal. At the Fort Worth airport, we couldn't check our bags through because our original flight was with Varig. The guy at the desk assured us that he would just check them through TAM through some sort of official override, and that we would still be on the same flight because it was operated by TAM anyway.
The flight from Dallas to Sao Paolo was fine, but I didn't get much sleep. When we arrived in Brazil, the people at the TAM counter couldn't find our boarding passes
1 Simon making burgers
. They took our tickets and our luggage tags and told us they would look for our reservation and get back to us. An hour later (half an hour before boarding) they told us we have no reservation, go talk to American Airlines (from whom we bought the tickets in the first place). We go to American Airlines (a half hour walk across the airport) and the people there tell us that we do indeed have reservations on the computer, but that TAM are jerks who frequently do this to passengers when they have overbooked their flights. The AA guy books us on the next flight, at 10pm and gives us meal vouchers. We settle down to spend 14 hours getting to know the Sao Paolo airport (as though we didn't already know it from the 12 hour layover traveling the other direction).At seven pm we go to the check in counter. No one is there. We spend some meal voucher on ice cream. At eight I stand in line for twenty minutes to find out that the flight has been delayed until 1:30am and no one knows where our luggage is. We get boarding passes this time. We check on the luggage 5 more times. No one knows. We finally board. I'm so tired I'm nauseous. We get into Asuncion at 3:00am. We find our bags in a huge pile apparently from the morning flight (yea!). We ask four different baggage handlers if we have to wait in the fifty-people-long-moving-super-slow line to claim our bags and they all tell us yes (we are suspicious because no one in this line leaves with baggage, as though theirs was lost)
2 our friend Oscar
. Sure enough, we get to the front of the line and the guy tells us, oh, you already have your bags? You can just go.We get a taxi. He charges us more than he is supposed to. We get to the hotel and all of the rooms are full. We go to another hotel. Same story. We go to four more hotels. Same story. At the last hotel, the guy tells us there is a soccer game tomorrow, that's why we can't get a room. We give up and go to the Peace Corps office and call the security director (at 4:00am) for permission to just stay here. He says yes and we crash out on the couches. When we first had problems at DFW, Simon and I looked at each other and said, you know, if they don't want us back, we could just stay . . .
Well, here are pictures of our trip home. Hope you enjoy!
